Research

Colleagues and friends share their remembrances and stories of Patricia (Pat) McLaughlin, long-time Belfer Center colleague, who passed away February 1, 2020. 

Stephen Walt details how Europe is suddenly facing serious questions about its future role in world politics—and even in the trans-Atlantic relationship.

We’re living in the information age. But when it comes to fundamental change in society, organized industrial workers remain a powerful, bedrock force. And that’s just as true in Iran as in other modern nations.

Foreign partners' willingness to help the United States is affected not just by America's hard military and economic power, but also by its soft power of attraction, based on an open culture, liberal democratic values, and policies that are perceived as legitimate. U.S. foreign policy can succeed only if Americans relearn this.

Statement by the Defending Digital Democracy Project on their work with the Iowa parties. 

PRIOR TO THE ELECTION OF DONALD TRUMP, and the current season of hand- wringing about democracy’s prospects for survival in the United States and Europe, Western social scientists tended to think of democracy as something “we” had achieved and “they”—that is, the peoples of the so-called developing world—had yet to grasp. The hypothesized reasons for this gap between “us” and “them” were many.

Churchill observed that the further back one can look, the farther ahead one can see. To help the Aspen Strategy Group look ahead to prescriptions for the U.S. in the current strategic competition with China, the organizers asked me to look back at previous great power rivalries. Specifically, they assigned me two Applied History questions:

• “What are the lessons from history we should be aware of when two great powers collide?” 
• “What should the U.S. learn from these to shape its policies on China?”

The study of existential risk — the risk of human extinction or the collapse of human civilization — has only recently emerged as an integrated field of research, and yet an overwhelming volume of relevant research has already been published. To provide an evidence base for policy and risk analysis, this research should be systematically reviewed. In a systematic review, one of many time-consuming tasks is to read the titles and abstracts of research publications, to see if they meet the inclusion criteria. The authors show how this task can be shared between multiple people (using crowdsourcing) and partially automated (using machine learning), as methods of handling an overwhelming volume of research.

As coronavirus continues to spread, the Trump administration has declared a public health emergency and imposed quarantines and travel restrictions. However, over the past three years the administration has weakened the offices in charge of preparing for and preventing this kind of outbreak.

How “war on terror” rhetoric contributed to the repression of Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in China.